If you’re depressed that we’ve been stupid about the COVID-19 crisis, buck up and learn a little from the past.
As a species, we’ve been this stupid before. Plenty of times. And we’ll be this dumb again, and again. We tend to forget that we’re only the planet’s smartest ape. Dolphins have bigger brains. We are still evolving.
Consider that vaccines have been around only about 200 years. In terms of the evolution of human thought, that’s the blink of an eye. Tens of thousands of years separated mankind’s discovery of agriculture and our first use of irrigation. There’s a similar gap between when we created the first stone tools and when we attached them to sticks, creating hammers and clubs.
We are slow learners.
Just a little more than 300 years ago, we killed people in this country for being witches. It was only 158 years ago that our nation – founded on the ideas of freedom and equality – accepted that people should not be allowed to own other people as slaves. And it was a mere 57 years ago, during my lifetime, that the majority of Americans accepted that those former slaves should enjoy the same basic rights as other people.
We are savages.
Most of our nation’s effort, as represented by the federal budget, is aimed at killing other human beings. (Though we call it “defense,” our more honest grandparents used a more accurate term, “Department of War.”) Capitalism, the system by which we provide for our physical needs, is greed-based and largely about putting it over on our neighbors. The greediest humans of all we put on TV shows and magazine covers. Our justice system, in many states, still involves killing people as punishment for killing people.
We are believers.
About 85 percent of the people in the world are religious, tied deeply to one form of organized superstition or another. We tend to believe more than we like to think. Believing is more comforting and it’s easier. Reasoning takes work, including confronting one’s prejudices, testing ideas and sometimes mustering courage to admit that our previous thinking may have been faulty. Belief feels good. It’s full of reassurance. And it saves a lot of time.
We don’t know our history.
A few years ago while speaking to some 30-year-olds, I mentioned that the 1990s weren’t that long ago. They were aghast at the thought that they may have indeed been born yesterday. Here are the numbers. Our planet is 4.5 billion years old. Our species is 300,000 years old. That means we’ve only been around for one fifteen-thousandth of the show. Dinosaurs were around 550 times longer than we’ve been here. As critters, we are just starting out. We have a long way to go and we don’t move ahead all that fast.
Have some patience.